CTM Radio Lab

Commissioned Works

Since 2014, the CTM Radio Lab has been dedicated to exploration and experimentation within the medium of radio. Each year, the ongoing project supports two works commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur - Hörspiel/Klangkunst and CTM Festival, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 Kunstradio, and ICAS – International Cities for Advanced Sound.

The yearly CTM Radio Lab Open Call for works seeks unusual ideas for pairing the specific artistic possibilities of radio with the potentials of live performance or installation, that also explore the concurrent CTM Festival edition's theme. The two yearly selected works premiere at the CTM Festival, and are subsequently broadcast via Deutschlandradio Kultur and the ORF (Austrian National Broadcasting Service).

CTM 2017 Radio Lab

↑Julian Bonequi – "The Death of the Anthropocene" @ CTM 2017. Photo by Stefanie Kulisch.

CTM 2017 Fear Anger Love examined the unhinging and emancipatory potential of resonant (musical) emotion to recurrently question and challenge the status quo. This year's Radio Lab again offered winning projects a 2-week residency through support from the SoCCoS - the Sound of Culture, the Culture of Sound network and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

“The Death of the Anthropocene” by Mexican artist Julian Bonequi imagined encounters with mysterious mutants, composite human-robot-animals, aliens… all met with aggression, shock and disbelief as they paint grim pictures of the future of humanity. The conversations, animated with narration, incidental sounds and specially composed musical extracts, were accompanied by Bonequi’s own 3D animation.

In 2014, Rima Najdi performed “Madame Bomba: The TNT project” in her hometown of Beirut. To open a conversation about anxiety and fear caused by pervasive violence everywhere she wore a fake cartoon TNT bomb while roaming the streets. Taking off from this action, “Happy New Fear” blends experimental music and sound sourced in Beirut by Kathy Alberici, visual projections by Ana Nieves Moya, and live narration by Najdi as it follows Madame Bomba and her search for her lover in the city, a stranger who exists in the collective consciousness and of whom everyone is afraid of.

CTM 2016 Radio Lab

CTM 2016 New Geographies examined today’s rapidly collapsing borders and emerging new hybrid topographies, as well as the tensions and essentialist backlashes that arise as a response to these changes. This year's Radio Lab notably offered winning projects a 2-week residency through support from the SoCCoS - the Sound of Culture, the Culture of Sound network and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

With her proposed project, “All Hail Mother Internet”, Deena Abdelwahed asked “How would I have ended up without having access to internet when I was a teenager?” as a starting point to explore frustrations about feeling fixed by the constraints of a predefined culture, place, identity, and the strategies employed to tackle them.

“GAD Technologies” is a project by Marija Bozinovska Jones aka MBJ Wetware, who proposed a collaboration with J.G. Biberkopf. As a verb, gad is defined as “to move from one location to another in an apparently random and frivolous manner”. It is also an abbreviation for General Anxiety Disorder. Floating in a virtual realm where cultural markers, gender, position and race are symbolic and arbitrary, and where subjectivity becomes divorced from the constraints of locality, “GAD Technologies” intended to add to existing geopolitical complexities and representations.

CTM 2015 Radio Lab

The first of two winning projects, titled "Always Here for you: ASMR - Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response", was proposed by Berlin-based American Claire Tolan, a young artist and programmer exploring human-computer interaction, online communities (intimacy, privacy), and information structures and theory. Tolan’s work premiered as an installation during CTM 2015.

The second Radio Lab project, "In the Darkness of the World", took shape as an experimental radio play performed through a multichannel setup at HAU2. Artist Sol Rezza’s work pulled the hydrophone away from its primarily scientific usage into the realm of storytelling, in order to recount Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea through sound.

CTM 2014 Radio Lab

For its first year, the CTM 2014 Radio Lab supported two winning projects within its 15th anniversary Dis Countinuity theme, which focused on hidden connections between past and present musical experimentation by fostering dialogue between musical pioneers whose ideas and discoveries continue to influence how we create and experience music today, and a rising young generation of artists.

"Walk That Sound" by Lukatoyboy used the commonplace yet often forgotten walkie-talkie to create a moving urban sound portrait based around Kottbusser Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg.

∏-node was an experimental platform for hybrid Web/FM radiophonic composition. As a multi-dimensional radio infrastructure platform, ∏-node explored the narrative, participative, and imaginary possibilities of radio through the use of both historic and new, digital technologies.